Just Tree

Just tree. It's a Buddhist expression. The idea is simple, but the practice in not so simple: Can you see the tree just as it is in this moment, without adding to it? No, "This tree really needs pruning," or "This would be a great tree to build a treehouse in" or "This looks like the tree in the backyard of the house where I grew up." Just tree. There is a tendency to add to or interpret just about everything that passes through our range of site, that is, if we see it at all. The other alternative is to walk right past that tree and fail to see it because we are lost in the monologue in our head, our inner, virtual reality.

I have been practicing "just tree," but not only with trees. I have been practicing receiving what the moment gives, without attempting to add to it, interpret it, judge it or change it. No preferences! Today, I was very much lost in my thinking and busy designing up a future scenario that met all my personal needs and wants, so I shook myself off and got up to take a walk to the wilderness area behind my house, thinking that if I could go to nature it would be easier to get out of my head and practice "just tree."

I was surrounded by trees! I would guess that I missed the first half mile of the hike (and the trees) because I was still playing out that inner monologue. Eventually, I felt the breeze and smelled the new, spring grasses. Eventually, I even started to notice the trees. I blush to say that it took a while. It is easiest to do this (to return to the present moment), when I walk. I let the earth do the work, step by step, and she takes me home, helps me remember. In this case, the remembering was that just this moment is all I ever have. Today, it was easy to be at ease with just this moment, because it was sunny (but not TOO sunny) and cool (but not TOO cool). In other words, there was no reason to push away the moment or compare it to a version of the moment I'd prefer. I could be in the moment, just as it is.

Writer and teacher Michael Singer likes to remind us that it took 13.8 billion years for this moment to arrive in exactly this form. Who am I to try to mess with that miracle? I will continue to play with future visions, and I will do that inner creating in JUST this moment. Maybe I need to tack that word on a wall somewhere: just. Maybe I need to paint it in letters, six feet high. Just this moment. It's enough and it is all there is. JUST. TREE.